Tuesday, August 21, 2012

I
found myself missing the mile in this year’s Olympic coverage. Of course, the
Olympics have always been metric so, really, there is nothing to miss. They’ve
been running the 1,500 meter race, ‘the metric-mile,’ since Athens One.

Bannister finishes ahead of Landy, August, 1954
Vancouver Sun

But
I was missing many different mile races and Cascadia’s greatest footrace was
sitting right on the top of my mind. It happened 58 years ago this month, the
1954 Commonwealth Games in Vancouver, British Columbia where Dr. Roger
Bannister out-kicked the world record holder, John Landy of Australia to finish
at 3:58.8. It was the first time the only two four minute milers met. It was
the first time two people ran an under four minute mile in the same race.

It was a race all about the relatively few strategies available to the each athlete and
how each played to his strongest point. Landy the efficient, clean runner.
Bannister the loping sprinter at the end. Each was running hurt. Bannister had
the beginnings of a serious cold and Landy stepped on a used flash bulb on the
ground near where he was staying and had a gash in his foot.﻿

90 yards from home
Charlie Warner

Most
people remember the race at its signature moment, when Landy, who had gone to
the lead early hoping to burn off the closing speed of Bannister, peeks out
over his left shoulder with about 90 yards to go and at that exact moment,
Bannister goes into overdrive and passes Landy on the right, killing any hope
of Landy responding to his speed. Bannister once ran a :53 second
last quarter. Landy had nothing like that.

Bannister
would retire from racing after one further race in Europe and be the physician
he studied to be, but his shadow fell across the ten years that were the glory days
of the mile run because he was the first to break four minutes and was
universally admired for it. While both Landy and Bannister struggled as Olympians,
Bannister fourth in the 1500 meters in Helsinki, 1952 and Landy third at
Melbourne in 1956, their duel in Vancouver was better than any gold medal and
was the great opening number of ten dazzling years of the mile.

Three
other stars followed Landy and Bannister, with a host of near stars running
with them, just a couple of steps back. In the United States there was a young
man named Wes Santee from the University of Kansas who, in the month following
Bannister’s 3:59.6, ran two races at 4:00.5 and 4:00.6 in successive weeks, one
and a half strides away from breaking four minutes.

Wes Santee
University of Kansas

Santee was
cocky and rough and had troubles with the overreaching authority of the Amateur
Athletic Union, which mandated many things in a track and field athlete’s life
during the 1950s. For the 1952 Olympics, the teenaged Santee qualified for the
US team as a 5,000 meter runner and fully intended to qualify for the 1,500
meters, by far his best event, two days later. Santee’s plan was to withdraw
from the 5,000 assuming he qualified at 1,500, but the AAU refused to let him
enter the race, literally pulling him off the track. He finished far back in
the 5,000 meters in Helsinki, while a good but inferior runner, Bob McMillen of
Occidental College, won a silver at 1500, just missing the gold.

Santee and
the AAU were oil and water. He got in a shouting match with a German track
promoter in 1953 and was banned from international competition for a year. The
AAU set a limit on $15/day in expense money for competing athletes. It was a
ridiculous limit and frequently ignored by athletes and promoters alike. In
addition, a high profile athlete like Santee was often used to promote events,
give clinics on his training techniques, appear on television shows, etc. Meet
promoters, often doubling as directors within the AAU, recognized the greater
effort of such athletes with higher expenses. And, if a four minute mile was in
the offing, they wanted the athlete at any price.

In a
struggle lasting two years, the AAU tried to demonstrate that Santee was a
cheat. Their procedural tactics were clearly unfair. Ultimately, Santee
received a temporary injunction that allowed him to race in the Knights of
Columbus Indoor Meet in New York in 1955. The AAU threatened with lifetime
banishment any athlete who chose to race with Santee. Six men pulled out of the
event and Santee, by now a marine lieutenant, ran against two men recruited at
the last moment.

In 1956,
Santee was banned for life from competing in AAU events. That means all events.
The heavy handed prosecution of Santee by the AAU and its Soviet-style process,
led, eventually, to the recognition of track and field athletes as
professionals.

Elliott about to draw away from the field
in the 1500 meters in Rome
IAAF

Herb
Elliott was doing what many Australian youths were doing when the Olympic Games
came to Melbourne in 1956 -- smoking cigarettes, drinking beer and chasing
girls. While a good high school miler, he had other things in mind for his
life, though he had the body and the powerful, long stride to be a superb miler. He
needed motivation and got it when he was one of the 104,000 people
in the stands when the Russian, Vladimir Kuts, won the 5,000 and 10,000 meters.
There was something about Kuts that Elliott was fascinated by, how he ground
his opponents to dust, how he maintained a stoic cool, relentlessly pounding
away the 25 laps that make up the 10,000, leaving them not only well-behind,
but fully dispirited.

Cerutty in front, Elliott behind

Two
coaches dominated Australian running at the time. Franz Stampfl was offered the
job as coach at the University of Melbourne after success in Great Britain and
serving as a kind of an advisor to Bannister. Percy Cerutty would not have
taken the job, but was furious that it wasn’t offered to him. Cerutty was too
bizarre, too unconventional for any university. He used weights frequently in
training his distance runners, had them run up and down sand dunes, through the
sea. His diets were weird. He had John Landy for a time, but Landy was a loner,
not comfortable with this unusual man, though his performances improved
significantly under Cerutty.﻿

Franz Stampfl

﻿Stampfl's athletes spent the entire day on the track. Building up
speed and endurance with closely timed intervals – 10/400 meter splits with
precisely-time rest periods with some calisthenics mixed in. Landy disparaged
him as teutonic and thought the Australian temperament was not a good match.
But he succeeded, developing great runners and winning medals for Australia.

Elliott
went with Cerutty, liked his opinionated mayhem and soon, in 1958 and still a
teenager, was running under four minutes and regularly beating Stampfl’s best
man, Merv Lincoln.

“I had a
genuine sympathy for Merv," said Elliott. "While he was plodding his
way through monotonous training sessions, I was galloping over sand-hills…and
splashing through the surf, or frolicking in the beautiful Botanical Gardens.”

Elliott
made his first trip to the US in 1958 where he beat
Ron Delany, the gold medal winner at Melbourne in ‘56. Delaney challenged
Elliott to run in Dublin along with Stampfl’s man Merv Lincoln. Delaney faded
and Lincoln ran his best race against Elliott, but it was still Elliott’s race
in the astounding time 3:54.5, obliterating the world record. He would go on
win gold in Rome, setting the world record for the 1,500 meters as well. Vladimir Kuts was on the track to congratulate him on his world record time.

Elliott
was never beaten in the mile or 1,500 meters. After the Rome Olympics he retired
from competitive racing, accepting a scholarship at Oxford where the mile was,
for the first time since he met Cerutty, second place in his life.

Arthur Lydiard

New
Zealand’s Arthur Lydiard trained the great Peter Snell with techniques he
developed after dropping out of high school in the Great Depression and finding
work in a shoe factory. His contribution to middle distance running was the
gradual build-up of aerobic stamina by running considerable distances each week
and mixing in sprint training, hill running and other sharpening aspects of
preparation that would help the athlete peak for the big race. His athletes
would run as many as 100 miles a week to increase their aerobic capacity over time.
The greater the reliance on aerobic efficiency, using so-called long twitch
muscles, the less the athlete relies on anerobic running, where powerful short
twitch muscles perform very well but for only short periods of time.

Lydiard’s
runners would strive for a steady state of oxygen use. This efficiency would
avoid ‘oxygen deficits’ that would introduce the building up of chemical
compounds in the muscles, resulting in a feeling of fatigue and reduced
performance.

﻿

Lydiard
knew nothing about physiology except as he experienced it while, through trial
and error, he developed methods that worked. It would be 14 years before a
Washington State University researcher, working with Professor Peter Snell,
would publish the theories of muscle contraction that Lydiard knew only in his
heart.

Peter Snell

The world
became aware, first in Rome and then in Tokyo, that his methods worked on the
world stage. Peter Snell would break Elliott’s records in the mile in 1962 --
on grass! -- and in 1964 – Peter Snell came out of nowhere to win a gold medal
in Rome and won both the 800 meters and the 1500 meters in the Tokyo Olympics.

The guy
who sat next to me in my English Composition course was a participant against
Snell in that 1,500 meters in Tokyo and in Rome with Elliott. He was Dyrol
Burleson, a kid from Cottage Grove, Oregon, a mill town just down the road from
Eugene.

Tall and thin, 6’2” and 159
pounds, he qualified for the Rome Olympics as a teenager and would become part
of a large group of elite runners at the University of Oregon. He ran the first
four minute mile at Hayward Field for Bill Bowerman, the U of O track coach, a
disciplined teacher who blended what he had discovered himself with what other
coaches had developed over the previous decade. Bowerman is, unfortunately,
more known for making the first Nike shoes than for his amazing accomplishments
as a great middle distance coach.

Burleson had a front row seat for both Elliott and Snell. He made the US
Olympic team and lined up on the same track in Rome as Herb Elliott, first in a
preliminary, where both qualified for the finals, where Burleson finished
sixth. In an interview, he described what it was like to compete with Elliott,
who won by 20 yards.

“There was Herb Elliott and then the rest of us," Burleson said in an
interview. "I’ve never been dominated by anyone like he dominated us. I
was so impressed with Herb that I traded my American sweat suit and received an
Australian set in return. I had also read somewhere that Herb Elliott and his
coach, Percy Cerutty, would eat raisins and raw oats, so I tried that for a
little while.”

﻿

﻿

﻿

﻿﻿

Burleson on the last turn, his
competitors already blown away
GoDucks.com

﻿Burleson had tremendous finishing speed and always ran from behind. When he
lined up against Peter Snell four years later, in Tokyo, he had a chance to
medal, even win, because Snell’s true strength was in 800 meters. Snell was
also running his sixth race in eight days and vulnerable to the younger field.
Earlier than usual on the last lap, Snell broke free and took the lead,
surprising the field, including Burleson, who felt he should have gone out when
Snell went out. Burleson finished a disappointing fifth.

“My fault was that I let the runners get so far ahead of me as I was too cocky
about my finishing sprint. If you look at the tape of the race the runners who
got the Silver and Bronze medals were right in front of me. It would have
been easy to get through to win a medal. When Snell went to the lead I should
have gone with him. At the end of the race I wasn’t even tired at all. I could
have gone for 200 meters more. But I can’t do anything about it now – that’s
life. I don’t know what happened there but it was my entire fault. It bothered
me for several months. I just really screwed up there. But there are things in
life that you can’t redo.”

The careers of these fabulous athletes would all be short just as their after
retirement work was substantive.

Bannister’s mark initiates the ten glory years of the event because he had courage
and quietly believed in himself. If there ever was a student athlete in the
modern era, it was Roger Bannister. As a very young man, he decided not to
compete in the 1948 games in London, his home town, but rather continue his
studies and training at Oxford. In the run up to the first four minute mile in
May of 1954, he was a doctor in training at a hospital, on the track just 45
minutes a day.

He was 25 when he left competitive racing.

Sir Roger Bannister became a renowned researcher in Great Britain, running the
National Hospital of Nervous Diseases and editing an International Journal in
his specialty.

John Landy, a year younger than Bannister, retired two years after Bannister,
his last race the disappointing third place in the Melbourne Olympics. But just
prior to the Olympic race, in the Australian National Championships, he ran
another great mile for which a statue was also built.

Running just behind Ron Clarke, a young Australian rising in international
distance running, Clark clipped the heel of the runner in front of him and
fell. Landy was behind Clarke and he ran over him, his cleats piercing Clarke’s lower leg and arm.
Landy stopped, helped Clarke back to his feet and continued the race,
eventually, amazingly, winning it.

Herb Elliott

Landy worked in the chemical industry for a time, but ultimately became
passionate about protecting the natural environment of his country. He was
appointed Governor of the Australian State of Victoria, and served five years.

Herb Elliott, for a time the very best performer of his remarkable
contemporaries, retired at 22 after the 1960 games, though he ran
recreationally while at Oxford. His post-racing career includes being an
executive at Fortescue Metals, a large iron ore company based in Australia, CEO
of Puma, North America and head of the Australian Olympic Committee. He currently lives in Australia and is 70 years of age.

﻿

﻿Wes Santee became a marine colonel before he
retired. He died in November, 2010 in Kansas. He was 68. The AAU banned him
from future competition when Santee was 24 years old.

Peter Snell retired in 1965 after the Tokyo Olympics. He carries on research in
human performance that Arthur Lydiard would have loved to do if he ever got an
education. Snell studied at University of California, Davis and Washington
State University, where he received his PhD. Snell moved to Texas to teach at
the University of Texas, Medical Center at Dallas where he ran the school's
Human Performance Center. He lives in Dallas and is 70 years old. His home town
in New Zealand contains a statue of him breaking the tape in the 800 meter race
in Rome at the 1960 Olympics. He was virtually unknown at the time.

Dyrol Burleson recently retired from his work with the Linn County, Oregon
Parks Department. He retired from racing in 1968 after trying to qualify for
the 1968 Olympics, a goal he had made with the intention of redeeming what he considered
his mistake in Tokyo when he didn't go out and challenge Snell. He hurt his
calf in a tune-up race and was unable to continue his quest for a third Olympic
Team.

He was one of the 40 million people in North America who watched Cascadia's
greatest footrace.

“When
I was 14 I sat at the library at Cottage Grove High School and saw the
Sportsman of the Year was Roger Banister and that he was on the cover of Sports
Illustrated. I decided that I wanted to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated
and that I wanted to run the mile. So I set that as my goal. I really admired
Roger Bannister and I still do. What he accomplished was so much since he was
only running an hour a day while he was in medical school on a crappy track.
The race that is really memorable is the Commonwealth Championships in
Vancouver, Canada where Bannister and Landy faced each other. We saw it on
television and back then it was just incredible to be watching.”

Burleson made the cover of Sports illustrated in July, 1964, ten years, nearly
to the day, after the great footrace in Vancouver, BC.

Monday, August 13, 2012

When I
lived in the Leschi neighborhood of Seattle, a hillside overlooking the middle
part of Lake Washington, I would watch the boat traffic streaming away from the
southern part of the lake following the Seafair hydroplane races, the crowning
event of Seattle’s 72 year old summer festival.Though I knew there would be lots more good weather in front of us, actually the
very best Northwest weather, the end of Seafair was a punctuation mark
on the summer that somehow made me sad.I’d walk out of the garden and up the stairs to the kitchen where I’d
get another beer, or more likely a glass of whiskey.

While I
don’t live in that house above the lake anymore, I have that same feeling of
sadness at the end of Seafair and, for some reason, decided my familiarity with the history of Seafair needed some work and I took my whiskey over to my laptop when the blues came. It didn't take long to blow past Seafair to its very interesting predecessor, Potlatch, sometimes called Golden Potlatch, a stop and start
special event that began with great promise and some tragedy in the summer of
1911, seemed to gain a foothold in 1912, played host to a full bore riot in
1913 and was replaced with a choral music festival in 1915 after the Seattle Chamber of
Commerce decided a better use of its money would be chasing conventions. Potlatch revived for a few years in the
mid-thirties but was abandoned as World War II broke out.

When it
ended in 1915, a former booster of the event, The Seattle Daily Times, said
there was nothing to get upset about.

“Seattle
has discovered and promoted with a commendable degree of success a happy
substitute for the erstwhile, noisy and meaningless Potlatch.”

Festivals have always been markers – of time, accomplishment, our spiritual life.They were, in the fundamental meaning of the concept, a special event.Today, special events are more mundane -- business tactics, things we do to communicate ideas, to carry out commerce, to advocate, to create a purposeful unity.

Potlatch comes
from Chinook Jargon, the trading language of tribes in the Northwest.It derives from a Nootka (Vancouver Island) word and described a
celebration in which many people gathered together, feasted, gambled and made
gifts, often lavish, to one another.

UW Libraries

The first Seattle
Potlatch grew out of the civic energy generated by the 1909 Alaska Yukon
Pacific Exposition that celebrated the Alaska Gold Rush and Seattle’s gateway
role in the riches of the far north.Seattle’s connections to the tribes still had power
back in the early part of the last century, perhaps because we had so overwhelmed them, as we had the forest, and
they existed only in a pleasant myth.My old
neighborhood, Leschi, was named after a chief, likely innocent, authorities had hung
just sixty years before.

Planning
for the event began in April with a meeting of worthies intent on raising
enough money to make a good first impression.Mayor George Cotterill led off with his favorite topic, growing the city.“This year’s summer visitor is the advance
agent of next year’s permanent resident.”Frank McDermott, leader of the Bon Marche, the most successful
department store on the west coast, chimed in with “Cities are only learning
what merchants learned long ago - that it pays to advertise.”“It helps put Seattle on the map,” said
Joshua Green of the Inland Navigation Company.Blunt old Henry Broderick, the downtown real estate man, added:“The
Potlatch will pay if you do.Mail your
check now!”

﻿

Seattle Golf Club
UW Libraries

A prelude
to opening day of the first Potlatch on July 17 was the Potlatch Golf
Tournament, played at the new Seattle Golf Club, open at its present location since
1908.One of the more popular young businessmen
in Seattle, George R. Andrews, Seattle manager of the Burroughs Adding Machine
Company, was set to play in the tournament on July 13th.He was good – just a couple of weeks earlier he
won the Chapin Cup and the club championship in successive days.

He would
have been known as a “good club man,” a popular joiner in the Seattle upper
crust social scene.He and a number of
friends had a small party at the golf club the night of the 12th
which concluded about 10:00 PM.They
left at about the same time with George insisting he was in a hurry to get back
to his apartments in the New Washington Hotel downtown so he could be rested and ready
to tee off early on the 13th.

They drove
out onto Golf Club Road, George the second to last car out of the parking
lot.One of the cars ahead had a mechanical
problem and stopped at the city limits, then on 85th Street and
perhaps four miles toward the city from the course.When
the last car came along, ahead of George, his friends sensed something wrong
and back-tracked for the club, finding some skid marks about a half mile from
the club at a place called “The Dip,” an elevation change along the narrow, two lane
road perched above a small but steep embankment.

They
couldn’t see anything there until they picked up, in their headlights, the glint of broken
glass. They slid down the ravine’s edge until they saw the car at the bottom and
George at the foot of a stump, his neck broken.The skid marks and other clues suggested that Andrews was driving 60
miles an hour or so or before he flew off the road.One of his friends broke an axle while
searching and another car was damaged while backing up, nearly rolling into the
same ravine. There were many indicators that alcohol was involved, but the
Seattle Daily Times, never a friend of governmental performance, blamed the road builder, King
County, even bringing the Executive Director of the Good Roads Association to
the site to evaluate the quality of the road.Seattle Daily Times Publisher Alden Blethen was a member of the club and his sons were pretty
good at the game. He likely wished he would have
exposed any problems of “The Dip” that he had driven over so many times before
the accident.

Despite George's tragedy, they
finished the tournament, out of deference to the many golfing visitors in town,
but Potlatch never felt the same to Blethen or the Seattle Daily Times after
the George Andrews tragedy and subsequent events.

Still, the
first Potlatch was a hell of a party.It
had many of entertainments we enjoy in today’s Seafair.A big parade, water sports, even something
called a hydroplane, though it was really a float plane with wheels in its pontoons
that could scoot the craft noisily along the ground.

There were
nightly dances on the streets, a Chinese monster dragon dance and, in an
unfortunate sentence “a Japanese feast of lanterns.”Those Japanese and their hot food!

Pergola at First and Yesler
Seattle Municipal Archives

Seattle’s
Potlatch goals were fairly minimal – more growth, awareness of the city’s
accomplishments.The city was working
hard at gaining attention in 1911.In
1890, Tacoma and Seattle had about the same population, around 40,000 and the
same basic interests – access to major transportation linkages via the
railroads and ports.But Seattle
exploded in the next two decades as it went on an annexation binge and had
considerable organic growth as well.Suddenly, it seemed, Seattle was a big city with 250,000 people. It had pulled off a
spectacularly successful world’s fair, but it still yearned for more attention. The first Potlatch did just that and the one
the next year seemed even better.

UW Libraries

Every
summer festival has its auxiliary group, fundraisers and boosters who support
the event and march, in their white suits and shoes, in the big parade.Seafair has its “Commodores” formed five
years after the first Seafair in 1950.The Potlatch had an auxiliary as well, Tilikums, another Chinook word
meaning people who signify a nation.The
Tilikums marched in something even more uncomfortable than a poorly fitted white
suit.They wore great masks, really more
like totem poles, over their white robes.The masks covered much of their body and must have been clumsy at the
volunteer reception after the parade or, more likely, required a really big
check room at the host hotel.

It looked
like this event was on the rise in 1913, especially when Frank Baker, head of
the National City Bank, committed to be the chairman at a luncheon held at the
Moose Room of The Rathskeller restaurant.Baker would become the father of another Seattle banker, Miner Baker,
who for many years provided the regional economic forecast at Seattle First National
Bank and later served as a Seattle Port Commissioner.

There were
no invitations sent out for the dinner, people just knew to come and, at a
dollar plate, it was a big success.When
Baker spoke, he promised an event that would be the best yet.

It was, in
fact, a nightmare.

﻿

Alden J. Blethen, Publisher
Seattle Daily Times
UW Libraries

There are
many complicated antecedents to what caused the 1913 Potlatch Riots.First, there was Colonel Blethen, who wore
his heart on his masthead, where he sometimes described his publication as “An
American Newspaper for Americans.”One
of his goals, also on the masthead, was the defeat of Bolshevism, along with a
3,000,000 ton/year coking plant located in town.

The
Industrial Workers of the World had Blethen’s version of America always in
their sights and periodically would hold parades in front of the Daily Times offices,
their Red Flag of the revolution on equal level with the Stars and
Stripes.Of course, this infuriated
Blethen.He believed that their
continued organizing and speech making was dangerous, bad for business and
un-American and he constantly pressured the mayor to run them out of town as other towns had done.

﻿

George Cotterill, Mayor
Seattle Municipal Archives

But the mayor
and Colonel Blethen didn’t get along.Before becoming mayor, George Cotterill was the assistant to R. H.
Thomson, the great city engineer whom Blethen thought was out of control, by
and large true, and Blethen had him as a socialist as well because Thomson thought highly of public ownership. After the Great Seattle
Fire, Thomson blamed the poor performance of the private water companies for
the inability of the firefighters to put down the blaze.So, he created his own publicly-owned water
department, building the city’s water system on the Cedar River, 30 miles from
the town, hooking it up with wooden pipes.The dam he built to hold the municipal water supply led him to attach a power plant and run the
stored water through its generators. The resulting city-owned electric company delivered
significant value to the citizens of his town, the rate/kilowatt hour dropping
from 20 cents to 10 cents in a handful of years. Not only was Cotterill connected to Thomson,
but he had defeated Blethen’s pick, Hiram Gill, for mayor the year before.

So, when Blethen and
the management of Potlatch wanted the IWW silenced and off the streets of Seattle, Cotterill refused.

There are several versions of how the riots began. One of them had a young female IWW supporter speaking to a
largely IWW crowd on Washington Street in Pioneer Square.A few soldiers and
sailors here for Potlatch and having a good time in the square's many bars came
upon the scene and began heckling the speaker.She heckled back.At some point
the soldiers took over the platform and shouted their points of view to the crowd, who
shouted back.

The woman sought
to get her platform back and they refused.She told them the platform was rented and she would be charged a premium
if she did not return it on time, a point the military men who now had the box did not
buy.There was a struggle, a fist was
raised near the woman and one of the crowd stepped forward and decked a sailor.

IWW Hall
UW Collections

That night, after reading inflammatory accounts in the Daily Times about the incident, a mob consisting of soldiers, sailors and their friends busted up the IWW headquarters building as fights broke out everywhere. Other offices were ransacked, newsstands with Socialist and IWW materials were destroyed. Cotterill declared a civil emergency, cut off liquor sales and told Colonel Blethen that the only way he would publish another account of the troubles then ongoing was to have it reviewed prior to publication by the mayor.

Seattle
Police then refused to let a Daily Times extra edition be circulated to newsboys
gathered at the Times Building. The Times lawyers finally got an temporary injunction
against Cotterill and his gag order.

By then
troops had been federalized and the city was under martial law.Soldiers and sailors were sent to their ships
and barracks.While additional violence
was expected, it didn’t materialize, although it was clearly a precursor of truly bloody events in the remaining years of the decade -- the Everett and Centralia
Massacres, the General Strike and hundreds of smaller incidents in the coal
mine and lumbering towns across the state.

Absent from
much of the coverage of the 1913 event was the accomplishment of a young
woman, Alyn McKay, who set the altitude record for women in her small plane,
rising above the mayhem below in lazy circles until she reached 2,900 feet
which, at the time, seemed amazing.

Potlatch
would have one more year, 1914, and disappear from the civic agenda. Blethen would exit the following year, dying July 13, 1915.